Recently, the quantity and kinds of information made into web contents have been exponentially increasing as numerous people come to use the global telecommunication network, such as Internet, in their daily life. On actual service, these various web contents are displayed on display units of user terminals.
Meanwhile, one user commonly has a plurality of terminals, e.g., PC's, cellular phones, PDA's. It is natural that a user should want to have the web contents displayed on his/her own terminals.
Typically, however, the web contents are initially made by authors in consideration of the characteristics of user terminals to which they should be serviced. Namely, in order to service one web content for multiple user terminals, it is necessary to remake the web content into a plurality versions based on the types of user terminals and markup languages, for example, HTML, WML, and etc. Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to remake the web contents adapted for all the types of user terminals since enormous new types of user terminals are being developed.
There are several existing schemes for providing web contents and annotating web documents. One exemplary contents providing scheme, whose object is to retrieve and utilize desired contents from a plurality of books, classifies a plurality of books according to their editions, classifies the contents of each book into a plurality of paragraphs, converts the contents into a user-accessible format to generate new book data, and services the new book data to users based on keywords input by the users.
The above contents providing scheme provides a user with specific portions of existing books based on keywords input by the users. However, the content itself is not regenerated as new forms serviceable to multiple user terminals. In particular, annotations are merely used to indicate user's notes or comments to the contents.
One conventional web documents annotating scheme is to annotate and store a HTML document based on a virtual layer, which can be implemented as a plug-in software or JAVA application program. This scheme establishes a virtual transparent layer for a HTML document, in order for a user to write or draw lines or comments thereon. The annotation written or drawn by the user is converted into a picture format, e.g., GIF file, inserted into the HTML document and stored together with the HTML document.
The annotation of the above scheme is nothing but reference information to a web document located at a specific URL. Further, the annotation has its own limit of not being able to change the contents of the HTML document since it can only be handled as an image file.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,826,025, entitled “SYSTEM FOR ANNOTATION OVERLAY PROXY CONFIGURED TO RETRIEVE ASSOCIATED OVERLAYS ASSOCIATED WITH A DOCUMENT REQUEST FROM ANNOTATION DIRECTORY CREATED FROM LIST OF OVERLAY GROUPS”, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirely, relates to a system for merging annotations from various sources with web documents. The object of this system is to modify (Insert, Delete, Replace, and Run_Program) web documents. A web document is modified; an annotation document is made; the annotation document is merged with the web document; and the merged document is provided to a user.
In the prior arts, the role of annotation information is merely to provide user notes or comments to existing web documents while not considering equipment context information, such as capability of user terminals and display performance of a web browser. Thus, there exists a need for a method and apparatus for automatically generating new contents adapted for various types of user terminals.